A Vandal in the Tate

Trenton Oldfield. Jonathan May-Bowles. Names that will not live in history, even if their bearers desperately wish otherwise. The latest entrant to the ranks of these Y.B.A.’s—Young British Assholes—is Vladimir Umanets, who, on Sunday afternoon, walked into the Tate Modern, whipped out a black paint pen, and scrawled the message, “Vladimir Umanets ’12 A Potential Piece of Yellowism,” in the bottom right corner of Mark Rothko’s 1958 painting “Black on Maroon.” Anyone who Googled the phrase was, obviously, led to Umanets’s blog.

Umanets, a former art student from Russia, is the co-founder of a movement called Yellowism. According to a manifesto written by him and Marcin Lodyga:

Yellowism is not art or anti-art.

Examples of Yellowism can look like works of art but are not works of art. We believe that the context for works of art is already art. The context for Yellowism is nothing but yellowism. Pieces of Yellowism are not visually yellow, however sometimes can be. In Yellowism the visibility of yellow is reduced to minimum; yellow is just the intellectual matter. Every piece of Yellowism is only about yellow and nothing more, therefore all pieces of Yellowism are identical in content—all manifestations of Yellowism have the same sense and meaning and express exactly the same. In the context of Yellowism, all interpretations possible in the context of art, are reduced to one, are equalized, flattened to yellow. Interpreting Yellowism as art or being about something other than just yellow deprives Yellowism of its only purpose. Yellowism can be presented only in yellowistic chambers.

And so forth.

As of this afternoon, Umanets had not been arrested— Scotland Yard said that it was looking for “a white man in his late twenties”—but he was proclaiming to anyone who would listen that his intervention was not an act of vandalism. He had considered Picasso’s “Seated Nude” and several Jackson Pollock paintings, he told the (U.K.) Times, before deciding that he wanted to put the Rothko “in the context of Yellowism,” because Rothko “expresses his emotions so well.” (In May, a Rothko painting sold at Christie’s for 86.9 million dollars.) Umanets, much like the Spanish retiree who recently took it upon herself to touch up a prized fresco, insisted that his additions had been an improvement. He said, “With my signature this work will be much more valuable a work of art and also financially, because I changed the meaning. Someone who removes this signature will be an asshole.”

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